flathub update / mini infrastructure fundraiser

[Robert McQueen]

I was just about to write a mail saying we're all done and I was going
to place the order - then I realised... the quote is £800 + VAT (UK
sales tax) so the total needed is actually 960 GBP. Oops.

Anyway - we've reached a very impressive £800 thanks to our generous
donors so far:
 Alex Larsson
 Andreas Nilsson
 Bartłomiej Piotrowski
 Christian Hegert
 Cosimo Cecchi
 G Stavracas Neto
 Jakub Steiner
 Nathan Dyer
 Nick Richards
 Mario Sanchez Prada
 Matthias Clasen
 Michael Doherty

I'm going to put in the extra bit for now and just get the order placed
so we can do the interesting (ok - if you like servers) work, but if
anyone has got a little bit more down the back of the sofa, it will all
go towards hosting Flathub either this year or next.

Thanks again! :)

Regards,
Rob

On 13/06/17 12:40, Robert McQueen wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Just a quick e-mail to update on what I've been doing with Flathub
> seeing as we've missed the calls for the past couple of weeks (although
> I hope we can meet again on Monday)?
> 
> I've made a few notes at
> https://github.com/flathub/flathub/wiki/Launch-Todo but it would be good
> to update with the stuff I'm missing - am sure we're missing lots of
> stuff as I know Nuritzi and Michael have been working on some
> launch/communications planning too.
> 
> Legal:
> 
> The GNOME Foundation agreed to support Flathub by offering the support
> of their legal advisors, so I sat down last week with Neil McGovern and
> sent out our initial queries/requests to get the ball rolling on the
> contributor/uploader agreement and end-user terms of use. We're waiting
> to hear back with a confirmation about who can do the work.
> 
> Infrastructure:
> 
> GNOME has offered that their sysadmin (Andrea Veri) can help with some
> of the set-up/monitoring but we'd like to keep the Flathub
> infrastructure independent from GNOME's so that we can make our own
> decisions about eg, making it easier to install proprietary apps,
> collecting donations for app authors, etc.
> 
> We've got donated build nodes from Codethink and cloud credit from
> Scaleway, but we're still "squished" in with 6-7 VMs on our 50 EUR /
> month credit - and it's a bit of a production blocker as it's not the
> most reliable (LVM + nbd = already broke last weekend :/) and has no
> redundancy/backups in place.
> 
> The thinking is that for the time being, rather than going Full Cloud
> (tm) we can just get "a server" to host the main repo and buildbot
> master, and use other hosts/nodes as build slaves, frontends, mirrors,
> etc - more distributed workloads where it's easier to integrate
> different providers and transient cloud instances.
> 
> A UK-based ISP (Mythic Beasts) has offered that if we pay their basic
> co-location fee of 800 GBP / year, they will donate a server (2x1TB
> RAID, 2-4 cores, 8-16GB RAM), 100TB/month bandwidth, monitoring and
> management services, so we're hoping to move forwards with that plan
> this week.
> 
> Fundraise:
> 
> To get the initial server ordered, we're trying to raise the necessary
> 800 GBP today - thanks to the generosity of #flatpak we've actually
> already raised 532 this morning. For convenience and considering it's
> not the world's largest sum of money we've been using
> https://paypal.me/ramcq so far - so the money is going to me personally
> and I will pay it directly over to the ISP - and I'll use any surplus
> for extending the server past the first year.
> 
> Thanks all!
> 
> Regards,
> Rob
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